KILLERS FROM SPACE (1954) ** W. Lee Wilder has everything you'd want for a classic genre piece-nuclear testing, stock military and animal footage, spouses sleeping in separate beds, mind control, bizarre power plant sets, a Studebaker, avant garde music-but he can't figure out what to do with any of it. Instead he keeps trying to pretend there's a plot, and in doing so the stupid actors (led by a very surfer-looking Peter Graves) keep getting in the way. Which is too bad, because Wilder had it in him to make a great film out of this. The aliens are incredible, and when he forgets about the plot and just trots out Graves to cower before a screen of magnified insect and gila monster footage, to the accompaniment of Manuel Compinsky's spectacular experiments in reverb, echo chambers, and backwards tape splicing, the result is truly brilliant. It's too bad that Jim Varney never pulled out the menagerie segment, superimposed his own face over that of Graves, and built his own three-hour opus around it.
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